Four Minnesota members of Congress appear to want to help shift control of elections from state and local governments to the federal level, as called for by President Donald Trump.
The four — chief sponsor U.S. Rep. Pete Stauber and co-sponsors Reps. Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad and Michelle Fischbach, all Republicans — have just introduced a bill that would require state Secretary of State Steve Simon to provide all Minnesota voting records to Trump’s Department of Justice.
If the records aren’t turned over, the four want to deny all federal funding to state and local governments for assistance in election security and upgrades.
Their rationale for the bill is that DOJ should inspect all Minnesota’s voting records from the 2024 election to ensure election integrity — shorthand for looking for illegal voters. Remarkably enough, the members cite no evidence of actual election fraud. In fact, a St. Thomas University study found only three state convictions of undocumented immigrants for unlawful voting or registration between 2015 and 2024, a period when 13,403,668 general election and primary ballots were cast. Even a recent Department of Homeland Security review found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
The state voting records the four members want to give DOJ include names, addresses, driver’s licenses and partial Social Security numbers of all Minnesotans who registered to vote in 2024, as well as when they voted. Simon says it would be illegal for him to turn over the records. Besides, DOJ has not provided sufficient justification for its request, he says. Nor has DOJ said how it would use the information, with whom it would be shared, and how it would be safeguarded.
Over 30 other states have similarly rejected DOJ’s demands for the records, and it has sued Minnesota and 23 other states to obtain them. Federal judges in California, Georgia and Oregon have ruled DOJ is not entitled to the records.
Minnesota’s voting records seem to be particularly important to Washington. The four Minnesota members so far are the only congressional representatives sponsoring legislation to punish their own state, despite the fact that over 30 other states have rejected similar DOJ demands for voting records. Their bill follows Attorney General Pam Bondi’s suggestion after Alex Pretti’s death to withdraw Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from the state if, in addition to complying with other conditions, the voting records were supplied to DOJ.
Minnesota’s voting records will be helpful if Trump is able to, in his words “nationalize voting.” Despite the Constitution’s rule that states run elections, in a Feb. 2 appearance on a conservative radio show Trump called for a federal takeover of elections, a demand he repeated in a news conference the next day.
On the radio show, Trump said voting should be nationalized “in at least 15 places.” Minnesota would likely be one of those “places,” since Trump has lost here each time he’s run. He claims without any evidence, that if not for fraud he would have won Minnesota in 2016, 2020 and 2024. Actually, 2016 was the closest Trump has come in actual vote count here when he lost to Hilary Clinton by 44,000 votes. Presumably Georgia, which he lost in 2020, where DOJ recently seized that year’s voting records of the state’s most populous county, would be another “place” whose elections Trump would like to nationalize.
Any effort to nationalize elections would be contrary to the Constitution, which says each state runs its own elections but Congress can “make or alter” any regulations. No power over elections is given to the president or executive branch other than administering congressionally passed laws.
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America’s decentralized method of running elections has worked remarkably well since the nation’s beginning. Citizens at the precinct level run elections with backup support from township, city, county or state offices. If and when fraud or human error occur, they’re not widespread, instead they’re limited to the local level. Anybody who has endured an electrical blackout with thousands or hundreds of thousands of others, or visited the Soviet Union before the fall of Communism, is acutely aware of the dangers inherent in any centralized system like Trump wants.
The locally based Minnesota election system, manned by members of both major parties, that Reps. Stauber, Emmer, Finstad and Fischbach seem to distrust, is well run. An indication of the trust of their constituents and other Minnesotans in that system is turn-out is usually the highest or among the highest of all the states. When fraud does occur, it is vigorously prosecuted by county attorneys. As can be seen in our current partisan balanced Legislature, Minnesotans carefully vote for their representation.
Democracy is robust here. It shouldn’t be run out of Washington.
Ken Peterson, an attorney and former state labor and industry commissioner, is a board member of Clean Elections Minnesota. He lives in St. Paul.